Agnes Arnold-Forster > Quotes

“Immigrants, refugees and the displaced might have yearned for the homes they had left behind – but those homes had gone. They longed for somewhere, but that somewhere was a place preserved in a particular moment in history.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Like many of those who lived through the Second World War, he had witnessed the horrifying consequences of overly myopic nationalism – a sentiment he partially blamed on nostalgic tendencies among people who had never quite managed to wrest themselves from the fantasies of youth and the family. Fascism, for him, was an unintended consequence of societies that were resistant to change.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Davis was one of the first social scientists to theorize nostalgia. He argued that nostalgia made false use of the past. It is a reconstruction of events that can never offer a perfect facsimile. As a result, nostalgia tells us more about the present, its moods and anxieties, than about past realities.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“the nineteenth century, homesickness was a noble condition because it demonstrated a commitment to your family and your deep emotional roots. It was a virtue, a sign of sensitivity. But, as the twentieth century got underway, homesickness became increasingly infantilized and trivialized. An emotion that tied people to the place they were born no longer worked in an increasingly global world–one with porous borders that relied on a mobile workforce. The early twentieth century also witnessed nostalgia’s transformation from a disease into a relatively benign emotion. In the first few years of Queen Victoria’s reign, two new words entered common English parlance: ‘emotion’ and ‘scientist’. And, by the end of the nineteenth century, human emotions–including nostalgia–were objects of scientific study.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Since the seventies, sociologists, journalists, social critics, advertising executives and marketing academics have noticed the commercial power of nostalgia and claimed their particular moment in time as acutely and unusually backward-looking.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“However, nostalgia being based on personal experience does not mean, according to Davis, that the past either causes or explains nostalgia. In other words, what the past was actually like makes no difference to whether or not, or how intensely, the people of the present feel nostalgic. Instead, current circumstances prompt people to find nostalgic echoes in the experiences of their youth. It is the present that is the trigger.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“the exploitation of our emotions for commercial gain. 61 But, regardless of whether it was good or bad, the nostalgia industry was here to stay. More and more companies and cultural creators cottoned on to its commercial power and became increasingly adept at exploiting the feeling’s seductive qualities.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“seemed to produce a ‘collective identity crisis’, something profoundly troubling to people’s sense of who and what they were. It genuinely seemed that the centre would no longer hold, that any trace of certainty had vanished.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“In general, recent neuroscientific research does not reliably prove the hypothesis that an individual emotion can be consistently localized to a specific bit of brain tissue.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“nostalgic appeals have also been embedded in the twentieth-century revolutions and state politics of socialism. If ‘politics of nostalgia’ are a sign of what Nick Cohen calls ‘decay’, then the decline has been going on for quite some time.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“So nostalgic, so beautiful, so peaceful . . . Now 53 and would love to step back in time for just one day.’ At fifty-three, this commenter was likely born in the late 1960s, fifty years after the Edwardian setting of the original advert. They are, therefore, expressing nostalgia not about the time period captured by Ridley Scott, but for the 1970s of their childhood. They can’t remember the 1930s setting, but they might remember watching the advert for the very first time on their family television set.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, from 1810 to 1820. Brown’s work on human feelings was published in the 1830s, but it took some time for the term ‘emotion’ to become widely accepted. Even as late as 1862, Whewell preferred to use the compound phrase, ‘the desires and affections’, despite acknowledging that ‘emotional’ had been adopted by some recent writers. 13 Words are both ‘mirrors and motors’ of historical change, and the invention of a new term signalled a new way of thinking about feelings. 14 Brown drew a sharp distinction between ideas and emotions. Emotions, or ‘vivid feelings’, might arise from mental ‘consideration’ of people and things, but they were not thoughts. 15 Instead, the expression and experience of emotion required a combination of both body and mind, and they sat somewhere between the senses and the intellect.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“In his book, The Ministry of Nostalgia, the writer and historian Owen Hatherley”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“These people were homesick for places to which they could never fully return. As the researcher Dieu Hack-Polay put it, reflecting on twenty-first-century refugees, ‘the fact they cannot go home increases the level of stress. The difference is the choice.’ 26 While students, for example, might choose to move away from home, danger strips refugees of that agency.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“In 2022, a team of researchers outlined the consensus. 8 Nostalgia involves four main brain regions. One: the region associated with self-reflection (the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and praecuneus). Two: the region related to autobiographic memory, long-term memory and the recall of factual details from the past (the hippocampus). Three: the region related to the regulation of emotions (the anterior cingulate cortex and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex). And four: the region related to reward processing (the striatum, substantia nigra, ventral tegmental area and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). These various regions make up the so-called ‘nostalgic brain’.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“much wartime re-enactors, professional jousters and Medieval Times employees might insist they’re motivated by historical accuracy, for many consumers of these performances, it simply does not matter.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Nostalgia has the power to make you buy things, but it can also change the world you choose to live in. For some, nostalgia is more than just a passing feeling. It prompts people to remake their surroundings, to take themselves back in time and live as their predecessors did, complete with Victorian dress, 1940s appliances or 1970s wallpaper.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Pioneering work conducted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggested that emotions are related to a group of structures in the centre of the brain, called the limbic system. 3”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, homesickness and nostalgia sat on the same spectrum, one deadly and one relatively benign, but both a desperate longing for a place departed.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“One of the most confounding things about nostalgia is not just its transformation from disease to emotion, but also its slow conversion from something associated with place, to a feeling connected to time.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“historical nostalgia meant a yearning for a past one never experienced. A desire to retreat from contemporary life by returning to a time in the distant past that might be viewed as superior to the present.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“The two feelings were similar, but crucially not the same. However, to understand nostalgia and its strange trajectory, we need to spend some time with homesickness and follow its journey from elevated sentiment to immature sentimentality–a route nostalgia also followed at approximately the same time, albeit ending up in a slightly different place. As nostalgia and homesickness parted ways, they were both slowly denigrated. One became an infantile attachment to home and family, the other an ill-informed bond with the past.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“After all, while nostalgia might be bittersweet, it is usually more sweet than bitter.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“On the one hand, nostalgia was ‘deeply implicated in our sense of who we are, what we are about, and . . . whither we go.’ It was one of the many means at our disposal for the ‘never-ending work of constructing, maintaining and reconstructing our identities’, an attempt to salvage a self from the ‘chaos of raw, unmediated experience’. 57”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“But, for some aficionados of the Middle Ages, it is not enough to enjoy the past vicariously through a novel, film, piece of artwork or pageant; instead, they must (re) live this past themselves. 13 They do this through live-action role playing, jousting, re-enactments and travel destinations such as Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“an individual emotional experience. Or it could be a collective one, something prompted by rituals and shared experiences, written about in the press and cultivated or exploited by politicians, for example. This collective version of nostalgia is just as often a genuine feeling as it is an abstract concept.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“But with this nostalgia came a strange kind of amnesia.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“There were those obsessed with the past, both ancient and recent, who sought to resurrect ghosts and ghost beliefs.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“To what degree emotions are biological or cultural is still very much up for debate in psychological circles (and, to an extent, in historical ones too), but, as Mlodinow puts it, science has not yet identified ‘truly objective criteria to reliably determine whether a person or an animal is in one emotional state or another’. 12”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Left-wing movements and wider society alike have tended to identify nostalgia with conservatism. After all, if the Left is about progress, change and utopian visions of what is to come, then nostalgia ought to have little role to play in its design, politics and rhetoric. Left-wing politics are characterized instead as forward-looking, radical and, by definition, anti-nostalgic, un-nostalgic or even nostophobic.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion